Fly-tipping hotspot to be cleared - but it could take another six weeks

Fly-tipping blight spot to be cleared

A WILDLIFE corridor blighted by flytipping will be cleared once foliage in the area dies down.

Darcy Lever railway cutting, which runs perpendicular to Long Lane, has long been home to wildlife such as foxes and deer.

In the last few years, the beauty spot has become a littering and flytipping hotspot, with a number of developers unsuccessfully proposing to build on the land in order to stop the issue.

It has been agreed that community payback - people serving unpaid work community orders - will clear the cutting of all litter.

However it could be another six weeks before any action is taking due to the foliage which has become overgrown in the summer months.

Cllr Rees Gibbon, speaking at the Darcy Lever Residents Association meeting said: "We've been and looked and it's a considered opinion that if we put community payback on it now, which we intend to, they will miss nine tenths of the rubbish that's underneath all the foliage.

"So they're going to wait until the foliage dies down and then they can get at it and shift most of it out."

Little Lever and Darcy Lever councillor Sean Hornby said that it has been agreed for the the unpaid work to start towards the end of next month.

He added: "There's too much overgrowth at the moment so we need to wait until the end of September or start of October really.

"The rubbish there is an ongoing issue and it's been a controversial site for a long period of time.

"I've always been passionately against any plans to build on the site and we've successfully appealed against a few applications."

The Darcy Lever Residents Association was set up in the early 1990s to oppose student accommodation being built on Radcliffe Road but soon after they began fighting plans to fill in and build on the cutting.

In 1994, residents including Cllr Hornby took part in a protest walk against plans to develop it.

The cutting was sold in 2017 and since then a number of applications to develop on it have been opposed by members of the association.

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